Ashley Madison owner says over 87k women joined

Numerous reports have warned of the impending demise of Ashley Madison since hackers exposed the personal information of millions of the site's users, but the online forum wants its customers to know it's still growing despite the recent scandal.

"Hundreds of thousands" of people joined Ashley Madison last week, including 87,596 women, Avid Life Media, the platform's parent company, said in a statement Monday.

Avid Life said women sent more than 2.8 million messages the site, and that the ratio of men to women who actively used their account (female members are not required to pay to communicate with men) was 1.2 to 1.

The company alleged that a media report last week made "incorrect assumptions" about recently leaked data that exposed the personal information of 32 million of its users. It said journalists were attacking Avid Life instead of the criminals.

"Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated," the statement said, singling out an unnamed media report released last week. "This reporter concluded that the number of active female members on Ashley Madison could be calculated based on those assumptions. That conclusion was wrong." The company did not mention the outlet that published the report.

The statement comes less than a week after a Gizmodo report concluded that almost none of the women in Ashley Madison's database ever used the site. Gawker, Gizmodo's parent company, did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

The hackers as well as security experts have alleged that between 90 and 95 percent of the platform's customers were men.

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